The Screengrab : alfred hitchcock

Th-Th-That's All Folks! The Best & Worst Endings Of All Time! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

JAWS (1975)

Steven Spielberg comes in for his knocks on the "worst endings" part of this list: given all the resources in the film world, the poor guy just has trouble knowing when to stop. That makes it especially worth mentioning that, when he was young and desperate and trying to piece his first blockbuster together with spit and Scotch tape, he had the instincts and confidence and chops to tee up a daring high shot and make a hole in one. Peter Benchley, the author of the novel on which the movie was based, liked to recall the conversation he had in which he explained to Spielberg that the scene was physically impossible, and Spielberg replied that it didn't matter, saying that if he had the audience with him for the first couple of hours, he could sell them anything he wanted in the last five minutes, and as Benchley would admit, the kid was right. (PN)

MELVIN AND HOWARD (1976)

Jonathan Demme's version of the meeting of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards) and Melvin Dummar (Paul Le Mat) begins with a beauty of a long opening sequence, with Melvin giving the broken-down derelict Hughes a ride in his truck after picking him up in the desert in the middle of the night and gradually melting away his surly, defensive paranoia with the warmth of his cornball, middle American sincerity. The movie ends with a lovely little dream that finds the two of them back in the truck, with Howard taking the wheel from the exhausted, put-upon Melvin. Dennis Potter must have seen it and liked it, because he wrote a variation of it into the ending of his own 1985 film Dreamchild, with Lewis Carroll and the old woman who'd once served as the basis for his Alice standing in for Howard and Melvin, and it killed there, too. (PN)

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

When I first saw Apocalypse Now on VHS in the late '80s, the finale left me breathless. Willard terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice, took Lance down to the boat, and then, after they crept away down the river, the promised airstrike fulfilled Kurtz's final instruction and exterminated them all. In the above clip, over the footage that floored the teenaged me, Francis Ford Coppola himself explains why this was not his intended interpretation. But what does he know? Coppola, who would later go on to direct such gems as The Godfather Part III and the Robin Williams vehicle Jack, thought that what the film really needed was another hour dealing with French imperialism in Southeast Asia. Although Saturday Night Live cut to the quick in their satire of the ending (Martin Sheen played a man hired by the studios to travel up river and shut down the production, and Coppola, out of ideas, blew everything up), the explosion of the set and murder of the people who worshipped Kurtz like a god is a better fit for the themes: the destructive clash of Western imperialism and other cultures, Willard becoming as hollow as Kurtz, and the fucking horror, the horror. The Coppola-approved ending is below (some of it has been translated to another language, but the visuals are what's important at the end), and while the juxtaposition of Willard's face and the statue is beautiful, luster is lacking compared to the deep reds, yellows, and whites of the airstrike. (HC)

THE BIRDS(1963)

End of the world. You expect it to come from someplace obvious, like a nuclear blast or a plague or a monster from the deep. But instead nature has turned on us, and nothing's ever going to be the same. The clip above discusses the ending that Evan Hunter intended in the script. His version had more gore, but the visual implication in the actual ending of the movie is much more unsettling, the birds covering every surface, the horrible sound of their cooing and calls, the sky dark and ominous as the car slowly starts to twist along the road. End of the world. (HC)

And, of course, we certainly couldn't forget...

GONE WITH THE WIND (1939)

CASABLANCA (1942)

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

...but if we DID forget any of your favorites, then hopefully these two guys can pick up the slack...

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Final Farewells: The Best & Worst Death Scenes In Cinema (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Arnold Schwarzenegger in TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)

Why do people keep ruining James Cameron’s perfectly good endings? First, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley goes through hell to save poor little Newt in Aliens, only to have friggin’ David Fincher whack them both in Alien3 (because, of course, it’s much cooler to kill off beloved, memorable characters than, say, to create interesting new ones). Then, in T2, Cameron finished off the story he began in the original Terminator with a scene of noble, sacrificial self-immolation by the villain-turned-hero/father figure Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 (a.k.a. Arnold Schwarzenegger) that clearly implies the threat of a future evil robot dystopia has been averted...and a decade later, we’re right back where we started with Terminator 3, Terminator Salvation and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. As it turns out, Arnie didn’t have to lower himself into that vat of molten lead after all (a scene I could only illustrate with the clip above, since every other version and parody on YouTube has embedding mysteriously disabled, possibly by Skynet). But the scene nevertheless makes my list of great deaths (even though cyborgs can't technically die) because, even more than the hyper-stylized imagery of 300 or Sin City, the fiery shot of the doomed cyborg descending towards oblivion captures the operatic melodrama at the heart of the modern comic book ethos as well as any Mexican standoff in the days when epic grand finales were Sergio Leone’s stock-in-trade. (AO)

Random Thief in AMERICAN HISTORY X (1998)

There are death scenes, there are gruesome death scenes, there are over-the-top nasty and ridiculous death scenes, and then there’s the unforgettable murder perpetrated by Edward Norton’s white supremacist in Tony Kaye’s American History X. In the ghastly attack, Norton’s skinhead confronts three African-American gentlemen trying to break into his car by shooting at them, killing one and injuring another. While spitting racial epithets, he forces the wounded man to place his open mouth on the street curb, and then stomps on the back of the man’s head, thereby fatally splitting his jaw (and face). Twelve years after first seeing the film, the mere thought of the moment still makes me cringe. (NS)

Jean-Paul Belmondo in BREATHLESS (1960) & PIERROT LE FOU (1965)

If you ever sit down to a compile a list of memorable death scenes from the movies -- an activity that I recommend, by the way -- you may find that they divide neatly into two categories, the quiet and reflective (typified at one end of the scale by the end of McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and the wild and flashy (summed up at the other end by James Cagney in, well, anything). In the films that bookend their period of collaboration, Jean-Luc Godard and his star Belmondo hit both extremes. In their breakthrough hit, Breathless, Belmondo, lying in the street with a bullet in his hide, came to terms with his happily misspent existence and enjoyed telling off his girlfriend one last time. Five years later, in Pierrot le Fou, the older and wiser man bids farewell to this cruel world (and to Godard's universe) by breaking out the boom sticks. (PN)

Godard's love of the purity of cinematic worlds is at its apex here. Pierrot Le Fou is a lusciously colored, beautifully shot film about how films -- along with other pop culture trappings -- steal logic from seemingly intelligent people. His characters vacillate between complex and ridiculous. Emotions are heightened without warning, the highbrow ideas of the film are treated to the most lowbrow signifiers, and suddenly Anna Karina is bursting into lovely song. When Belmondo, as Ferdinand/Pierrot, decides to off himself in the most dadaist way, he suddenly seems to realize that the absurdity that holds him in thrall is about to kill him. Ah, but it's too late. Such is the life of the modern man, I suppose: hypnotized by stories and images until the mere fact of living one's life is the same as starring in a fascinating and bizarre movie. The drama will kill you. (HC)

Janet Leigh in PSYCHO (1960)

Arguably cinema’s most famous death, Janet Leigh’s shower scene in Psycho remains a classic for a variety of reasons: the unexpectedness of the incident; the chutzpah Hitchcock exhibits in killing off his heroine midway through the story; the terrifying notion of being attacked unexpectedly and while defenseless; and the editing of the scene itself, a master class in audio-visual synchronicity that manages to convey a monumental amount of violence and bloodshed while never once showing the murderer’s knife making contact with Leigh’s skin. Plain and simple, it’s the death scene by which all others must be judged. (NS)

King Kong in KING KONG (1933)

For pure iconography, few cinematic sights hold a candle to that of King Kong battling aircrafts while clinging to the Empire State Building. Yet while the gargantuan ape’s subsequent fatal plummet to the NYC streets below is, ostensibly, a “happy” ending, what’s remarkable about the climax is how melancholy it plays. Carl Denham may believe “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast,” but the truth is that he – and we, as consumers who crave the type of entertainment sold by hucksters like Denham – are truly responsible for the fallen beast’s death, a truth that lingers long after the final fade to black. (NS)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Ten)

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 15 May 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
2. SUNSET BLVD. (1950)
3. THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948)
4. MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER (1971)
5. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
6. TAXI DRIVER (1976)
7. JAWS (1975)

If mechanical shark effects and John Williams' relentless theme music were all it had going for it, Jaws still might have become the highest grossing movie in history at the time of its release. And it likely would still be lumped in with Star Wars as a progenitor of the modern summer blockbuster phenomenon. In truth, Jaws has always been much more than a mere creature feature or special effects extravaganza. From the moment the Universal Pictures logo appears onscreen, accompanied by otherworldly sonar pinging noises signaling unfathomable depths of mystery, to the mournful dinosaur roar that accompanies the shark's final descent back to the murky deep, we are firmly in the grip of a master filmmaker. And while Steven Spielberg's gifts would eventually sour, with sure-handed storytelling giving way to transparent manipulation, here his every instinct is sound and his attention to detail astonishing. His tonal control is absolute; the darkest of horrors coexist with lusty seafaring adventure and character-based comedy, and it is all of a piece. The biggest laughs lead into the most frightening shocks, and vice-versa. It's a balancing act enhanced by the finest score of John Williams' career. His dum-dum-dum-dum shark theme is instantly recognizable to anyone on the planet - hell, sharks probably swim around humming it - but it's a remarkably resilient piece of music, speeding up into bursts of nautical derring-do, slowing down to an ominous, guttural portent of doom. The shark itself, when it is finally seen, remains an impressive movie monster. Even if its artificiality is more apparent to today's effects-jaded movie audience, its appearances are still fleeting enough to startle and delight. Set Jaws beside any of the contemporary summer cash leviathans and the hollowness of modern-day Hollywood's vision of action-adventure entertainment is laid bare.

8. PSYCHO (1960)
9. ANNIE HALL (1977)
10. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Andrew Osborne's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. STAR WARS (1977)
2. THE GODFATHER (1972)
3. THE GRADUATE (1967)

There are various movies that speak to me very personally -- and this one certainly qualifies, having spent most of my existence as an alienated, overeducated white dude -- but Mike Nichols’ tight, elemental collaboration with the dream team of Buck Henry, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Paul Simon & Art Garfunkle makes my list of Best Movies Ever because, like all the other movies in my Top Ten, it’s both an elemental, near-perfect example of -- and also rises above -- its genre to become a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic milestone. Plus, as a friend of my parents once said, it features the best use of a crucifix ever.

4. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

When a movie penetrates as deeply into the culture and the collective unconscious as this adaptation of Frank L. Baum’s first Oz novel, the filmmakers must have done something right. The fact that it was considered a commercial disappointment upon its initial release but nevertheless went on to become a beloved American classic also says something. But the main reason I include it here is because it’s a fully realized work of art that fully utilizes all the possibilities of cinema, from the grim black and white cinematography that suddenly explodes into color and the infectious soundtrack to the special effects that brought flying monkeys to a grateful world. It’s easy to take The Wizard of Oz for granted in this cynical, ironic, post-modern world, but honestly: who in cinema history kicks more freakin’ ass than Margaret Hamilton as Miss Elmira Gulch and the mean green you-know-who? Answer: nobody.

5. APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

As crazy-ass Dennis Hopper’s unhinged Kurtz acolyte would say, “I wish I had words...” Here are three -- epic, unsettling, iconic -- but they don’t even begin to capture the essence of the surrealistic war opera Francis Ford Coppola dragged into existence at the (temporary) cost of his own sanity four years after the Fall of Saigon. It’s difficult to separate the finished product from the legend of its infamously agonizing production history (see: Hearts of Darkness), and the generally terrible footage unearthed for the Redux version released in 2001 clearly demonstrates the razor thin line between genius and drek (and, seriously, what kind of zap did U.S.C. put on the heads of Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas that none of them can ever just leave friggin’ well enough alone)? Still, whenever people refer to the original 1979 theatrical version of Apocalypse Now as a flawed masterpiece, I always get confused, since the flaws (fat Brando, crazy Hopper, the slow descent into anarchy) are part of what makes it a masterpiece.

6. ANNIE HALL (1977)

7. SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

8. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

9. YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974)

Many of the movies in our consensus and individual Top Tens are beautiful downers, primarily concerned with death, violence, heartbreak and/or the inescapable ennui of existence -- and, while it’s true that depressing themes and great films often go together, it’s important to remember that celluloid is also a great delivery system for adrenalin shots of pure joy like Young Frankenstein, a nearly perfect movie with a hilarious script and a dream ensemble that ranks 9th on my list instead of 8th because (“Puttin’ On The Ritz” notwithstanding) the even more nearly perfect Singin’ In The Rain has slightly better song and dance numbers.

10. THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (2001)

You may have noticed by now that the vast majority of the Best Movies picked for these lists by the Screengrab brain trust were released prior to 1980, which does a great disservice to the Sundance generation of filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch, P.T. Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike Lee, Richard Linklater, Quentin Tarantino, etc. Maybe it’s just that films like Down By Law, Boogie Nights, Fargo, Do The Right Thing, Dazed and Confused or Pulp Fiction need to marinate for another decade before we’re ready to start comparing them head-to-head with the likes of Sunset Boulevard and Citizen Kane...but as far as I’m concerned, The Royal Tenenbaums already qualifies as one for the ages. By turns wistful, cynical, romantic, suicidally gloomy and insanely optimistic, Wes Anderson’s richly imagined masterpiece (about a burned-out family of geniuses in a dream-world New York) is everything I could possibly ask for in a movie: career-topping performances from everyone involved, whip-smart writing, gorgeous visuals, fearlessly eccentric style and Gwyneth Paltrow French-kissing a naked chick...top that, Orson!

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight & Nine

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Andrew Osborne

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Eight)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Leonard Pierce's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. CITIZEN KANE (1941)
2. PERSONA (1966)

Ingmar Bergman’s Persona opened so many cinematic doors for me, I feel like the film itself holds me in a sort of eternal debt. It’s an incredibly intense film, with some of the most powerful and difficult emotional moments I’ve ever seen on screen, but despite its often harrowing bleakness, it feels to me like a gift. Its performances are so titanic, and yet so subtle, they awakened me to what real acting, as opposed to mere performing, really meant; its philosophical and psychological depth is profound in a way that I thought impossible without descending into polemic; and its liberation from traditional narrative perfectly straddled the line between what had gone before and what was yet to come. Its emotional intensity, its quiet self-awareness, and its breathtaking erotic moments all supported a meditation on identity and reality that’s stunning in its power. Apparently, it changed things for Bergman, too – he spoke of it as being the first film where critical reception and commercial success were not at all under consideration when he made it. He sensed he was taking his work as far as it could go, and he was right: over forty years later, it’s still perched at the extreme of cinema, one of the most moving, most meaningful films I’ve ever seen, and more than anything else he ever made, justified his reputation as the medium’s most probing artist.

3. THE GODFATHER (1972)

4. DR. STRANGELOVE, OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)

As I discussed in my entry about Dr. Strangelove this past Thanksgiving, when we listed the movies we were most thankful for, it does the world the eternal service of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the words “comedy” and “masterpiece” need not be mutually exclusive. Of course, there’s a reason that most comedies aren’t great films: focusing on good jokes usually means ignoring things like extremely skillful direction and design, and staffing your cast with comedians usually means sacrificing the possibility of great acting. None of that applies here: Stanley Kubrick is at the very top of his game, applying his masterful sense of pace and visual keenness to the proceedings, and he brings just the right mix of actors to this pitch-black story of nuclear paranoia. By anchoring the film with a stunning triple-role by Peter Sellers, then the funniest man alive, and then coaxing master-class comic performances out of non-comic actors like George C. Scott, he managed to create a movie that was as brilliant as it was brilliantly funny. And good grief, is it funny: Terry Southern, the century’s finest portrayer of inappropriate behavior in high places, had a field day, coughing up at least a half-dozen of the funniest scenes in movie history. If the phone call to the Soviet premier, the scenes between Sellers and Sterling Hayden, or Slim Pickens’ loopy speechifying don’t crack you up, maybe humor just isn’t your thing.

5. THE BIG SLEEP (1946)

Film noir is far and away my favorite genre of film, so it’s curious that the one I choose as part of my ten greatest movies of all time is arguably not of the genre at all. The stellar adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s first Phillip Marlowe novel has plenty of noir trappings, but its focus on the lawman rather than the criminal, its traditional mystery structure, and its optimistic outcome puts it far more in the vein of a standard detective story than a true film noir. But for all that, it still captures the look and feel of post-war crime dramas like nothing before or since, and its masterful evocation of Chandler’s L.A. is unparalleled – quite a feat considering most of it was shot on studio back lots. Its brilliance is unquestionably the result of the collaboration of four men at the peak of their creative powers: Chandler, who created the unforgettable source material; novelist William Faulkner, whose script captured Marlowe under glass and then gave him a jolt of dangerous sexual electricity; Humphrey Bogart, who is simply as good as he can be in a role that seemed written just for him (though it wasn’t, not even close); and director Howard Hawks, who applies his professional approach to make the impenetrable narrative walk a razor’s edge. But the contribution of three women to this masculine film should never be ignored: Lauren Bacall, young and sexy and confident as hell, playing Marlowe’s lover/foil; Martha Vickers, as Bacall’s sister, who accomplishes the astonishing feat of stealing the film out from under her; and co-writer Leigh Brackett, one of Hollywood’s unsung heroines, who kept Faulkner’s contributions from getting too excessive and tightened the script until it rang. Simply amazing.

6. WEEKEND (1962)

7. PSYCHO (1960)

It seems equally strange that I’d count as one of my favorites a movie that more or less buried the noir genre. By shifting the focus of the killer from a dangerous badman on a doomed but comprehensible mission to an unpredictable psychopath who couldn’t be reasoned with, let alone understood, Alfred Hitchcock set a precedent for movie villains that later proved to be a disaster; but in his hands, it was a triumph. It was a major departure for Hitchcock, but shifting the emphasis from suspense to shock proved to be surprisingly simple for someone of his talents. As in all great films, every element comes together: from Hitchcock’s incredibly taut direction to Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking score to Saul Bass’ memorable credits to terrific performances from Anthony Hopkins and Janet Leigh (in one of the motion picture industry’s all-time greatest fake-outs), the great things about the movie totally overwhelm the viewer and leave you with the unmistakable confidence that you’ve witnessed greatness. It’s been a running gag here for years that Psycho can more or less be placed on any list we happen to put together; that’s a testament not to how much we love the flick, but to how much greatness it contains.

8. RAGING BULL (1980)
9. THE SEARCHERS (1956)
10. THE CONFORMIST (1970)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Presents THE TOP TEN BEST MOVIES EVER!!!! (Part Seven)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:00:00 GMT

Hayden Childs's Top Ten Best Movies Ever!

1. THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)

Although I listed The Wild Bunch in the first spot, this one is equally deserving. Perhaps more. The story is simple: poor peasant villagers, beset by marauding bandits, hire a group of down-on-their-luck samurai to defend them. But this is storytelling at its finest: lyrical, universal, and profound. Akira Kurosawa was a great fan of John Ford, and the epic sweep of Ford's Westerns added to the majesty of The Seven Samurai. Look, I can hardly talk about this movie. It's just too much.

3. McCABE & MRS. MILLER (1971)

4. BADLANDS (1973) & DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)

Terrence Malick's first two films are wondrous. I mean this in the sense that they contain wonders to behold and that they are themselves wonders. For one thing, they shouldn't work. Both movies are narrated by girls on the cusp of becoming young women, and both often suppress dialogue to emphasize through voiceover the inner lives of their narrators. Badlands recasts the story of serial killer Charles Starkweather into an insular fairy tale, a Brothers Grimm story about murderous innocence. Days Of Heaven is like an Andrew Wyeth painting given life, and like that other famous artwork that springs to life, Pinnochio, it's a much darker story with breathtaking beauty and sudden horror. (HC)

5. GRAND ILLUSION (1937) & THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939)

6. THE SEARCHERS (1956)

The Searchers is such a strange film, veering wildly between the unholy obsession, the blanket condemnation of racism, the anti-hero who might well be the hero, the cornpone humor, the score that screams of American exceptionalism even as the movie shows itself deeply ambivalent about America's past. This multifaceted approach is offputting at first, but utterly compelling over multiple viewings. John Ford and John Wayne made a hell of a lot of Westerns together, but this is the greatest. (HC)

7. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)

8. UNFAITHFULLY YOURS (1948) & THE LADY EVE (1941)

9. VERTIGO (1958) & LA JETEE (1962)

Vertigo is Alfred Hitchcock's finest film, an echo chamber of fetishistic obsession with an almost indescribably weird plot. La Jetee is Chris Marker's most accessible movie, a short film captured almost entirely in still shots with a voiceover explaining key plot points. The plot revolves around an obsessive remembrance of an event from the protagonist's youth. One of the major scenes echoes a scene in Vertigo. In his film Sans Soliel, which almost made this list, Marker explains how obsessed he became with Vertigo, wanting to copy it as a means of understanding and possessing it. The embedded video below contains all 26 minutes of La Jetee in its totality. (HC)

10. COCKFIGHTER (1974)

Monte Hellman made some heady no-budget movies in his heyday, but this one, in which Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who has taken a vow of silence, is the headiest (sorry, Two-Lane Blacktop, but you're second in my heart). Let me be clear: cockfighting is one of the ugliest, most vulgar and inhumane sports known to man, and I find it reprehensible. Hellman looks at it without flinching and finds the beauty within. Oates is one of my favorite actors, and never is he better than here, a movie in which he has maybe five lines of dialogue, although he is in every scene. (HC)

11. TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) & YOJIMBO (1961)

Both of these movies make art out of sheer pulp. By almost any standard, Touch Of Evil should be unbelievably bad, but it's astonishingly great, better, I dare say, than Citizen Kane. It's a police procedural where the killing and killer are completely irrelevant to the plot. It's a movie about a corrupt cop who is always right about his suspect even when he plants evidence (and unlike, say, 24, the film doesn't condone police corruption). It's a movie with an unhealthy amount of cheese and ham - Charlton Heston as a Mexican cop!, a biker gang all addled on weed who abduct Janet Leigh!, Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy fortune teller! Orson Welles in a fat suit (or should that be an even fatter suit?)! - that somehow turns it all into the finest cinematic cuisine. Yojimbo also starts with a pulp premise, in this case a samurai version of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and finds a way to frame it all into a stunning battle royale. (HC)

12. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

What the first thing an actor learns? The show must go on!

Here's several other movies that ought to be on this list, and would have been if I'd figured out a way to stretch the idea of Top Ten any further:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog, 1972)
The Battle of Algiers (Pontecorvo, 1965)
Chinatown (Polanski, 1974)
Ikiru (Kurosawa, 1952)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett, 1977)
Miller's Crossing (Coen, 1990)
Night of the Hunter (Laughton, 1955)
Playtime (Tati, 1967)
Ride The High Country (Peckinpah, 1962)
Rio Bravo (Hawks, 1959)
Week End (Godard, 1967)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight, Nine & Ten

Contributor: Hayden Childs

DVD Digest for March 24, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of good news for both 007 fans and lovers of classic Hollywood, and plenty of other goodies besides.

This week’s DVD of the Week is Criterion’s much-awaited release of Francois Truffaut’s The Last Metro. In this 1980 film, Truffaut for the first time addressed explicitly the subject of the French Occupation during World War II, seen here through the prism of a struggling theatre whose Jewish owner is hiding in the basement, leaving his leading-lady wife (played by Catherine Deneuve) to run the day-to-day business. There’s a great deal of intrigue in the film, not only involving a cocky young actor played by Gerard Depardieu, but with any number of Nazi sympathizers, informers, double-crossers, and sneaky Occupation types. But what comes through most clearly on this DVD release (and even more so on the Blu-Ray version) is how gorgeous the film is- how handsomely Truffaut re-created the period without letting the aesthetic concerns overwhelm the narrative ones. Likewise, this may be the most gorgeous Catherine Deneuve was on film- no mean feat, that.

The week’s other major classics release is the third volume of Warner’s Forbidden Hollywood Collection, this one featuring six films from director William Wellman- Other Men’s Women, The Purchase Price, Frisco Jenny, Midnight Mary, Heroes for Sale, and Wild Boys of the Road. Other classics releases this week include: Lemmon and Matthau (but not Randall and Klugman) The Odd Couple Centennial Edition (Paramount); Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief Centennial Edition (Paramount); Lilo & Stitch 2-Disc Big Wave Edition (Disney); the unofficial 007 adventure Never Say Never Again Collector’s Edition (Fox/MGM); and the Fast and the Furious trilogy (Universal, also Blu-Ray), with standard DVDs of the films available separately.

The recent releases for this week are highlighted by: Daniel Craig’s second James Bond opus, Quantum of Solace (Fox/MGM, also Blu-Ray); the animated adjunct to the Watchmen universe, Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter (Warner, also Blu-Ray); John Travolta as a talking dog in Bolt (Disney); and Anne Hathaway in Passengers (Sony, also Blu-Ray).

In TV on DVD news, this week brings: The Venture Bros. Season 3 (Warner, also Blu-Ray); Star Wars: The Clone Wars- A Galaxy Divided (Warner); The Riches Season 2 (Fox); The Life and Times of Tim (Warner); and Big Stan (HBO, also Blu-Ray).

This week’s biggest Blu-Ray only release is James Bond Blu-Ray vol. 3 (Fox/MGM), which includes Goldfinger, Moonraker, and The World Is Not Enough, also available separately. If you’re still looking for more action, you can always pick up The Matrix (Warner). And on the more dramatic side of things, this week finds Paramount release three of its artier films of recent years, A Mighty Heart, The Kite Runner, and Things We Lost in the Fire. I admit I would be more enthusiastic about these releases if they were films I actually liked, but I do like the idea that studios are actually attempting to spotlight more than just loud action movies on Blu-Ray. Hey, it’s a start.

Finally, I leave you with the Synopsis of the Week, this week courtesy of the FUNimation Entertainment release Fruits Basket Box Set. Here it is:

“The Sohma family is cursed; however, this is no ordinary family curse. When a member of the family is embraced by a person of the opposite gender, they transform into an animal of the Chinese Zodiac! The Sohmas have managed to keep the curse private for generations, but when a young girl stumbles upon their secret, life in the Sohma household changes forever. Conflict erupts as zodiac rivals clash in this most unusual household. Young Tohru Honda must promise the secret will remain her own - or face the consequences!”

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

TWO THOUSAND MANIACS! (1964)

In John Waters’ book Shock Value, Herschell Gordon Lewis explains that he became the Godfather of Gore somewhat by accident after ordering too much stage blood for a movie called Living Venus. By spilling most of his surplus in 1963’s exploitation classic Blood Feast, Lewis was responsible for the birth of the splatter/torture porn genre: “It doesn’t sound like much of an achievement,” he admits to Waters, “but we were the first with that kind of nonsense.” Yet while Blood Feast is, in its way, historic, I don’t remember too much about it beyond Mal Arnold’s spooky performance as Fuad Ramses, the world’s worst caterer. Also, I’m pretty sure there was a de-tonguing at some point. I saw Lewis' Two Thousand Maniacs around the same number of years ago, but for some reason the latter movie's vengeful but otherwise good-natured redneck killers are still vivid in my thoughts, partly because the movie’s theme song is so durn catchy, but mostly because its Down Home Brigadoon plot about ghostly Confederate citizens returning to life every hundred years to slaughter luckless Yankees haunts my thoughts every time my Northern ass crosses South of the Mason-Dixon Line (and, indeed, I’ve got my strategy all worked out if undead hillbillies ever stick me in their iron maiden-esque nail barrel and roll me down a hill)...though I’m still not entirely sure how Natalie Merchant figures into the equation.

TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (1971)

The Italian horror director Mario Bava is associated with the atmospheric diabolism and haunted crypts of such films as Black Sunday (1960), but with this contemporary murder mystery he, too, helped to create the slasher genre. This in itself is not the kind of accomplishment that gets you a Congressional Medal of Honor, but Bava's film (which is also known under the title Bay of Blood, among many others) shows just how stylish and entertaining a body count movie can be. It also demonstrates how impossibly convoluted the plot of a gory carny ride can get. But the sick joke ending is worth all the confusion experienced on the way there.

DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)

Movies are a collaborative art. That's worth keeping in mind even with regard to movies that don't often get mentioned in the same breath as the "A"-word, such as this Roger Corman production, a cheeky, low-budget variation on the violent-sports-as-metaphor-for-a-disintegrating-society idea that was treated with bloated solemnity in the big-budget Rollerball. Much of the cheekiness comes from the director Paul Bartel, whose other films (Eating Raoul, Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills) showed him to be a man with an eccentric, campy wit. They also showed that he had a tendency to concentrate more on keeping himself amused on the set than delivering a movie that could actually hold someone's attention from beginning to end. Bartel thought that Corman ruined this sci-fi satire, about a futuristic, government-sponsored auto race in which the contestants rack up points for the number of people they run over, by filling it with reshot bloody inserts to make it more violent, but Corman apparently thought that Bartel's cut was too toothlessly whimsical for its intended audience. Given the track records of both men, Corman's viewpoint must be respected, but the fact is that Bartel's goofy sense of humor helps to account for this movie's standing as one of the more enduringly enjoyable products ever to roll off the Corman assembly line. It also captures David Carradine, who plays the star racer Frankenstein, in his charismatic B-movie star prime, and Sylvester Stallone, as his thuggish, clam sauce-smeared rival, in the closest thing he ever had to a prime.

ROBOT MONSTER (1953)

One of the most persistent fictions about grade-Z exploitation cheapies like this deranged Phil Tucker anti-classic is that they’re exciting. Sure, they may not be artsy like some fancy-pants European auteur crap, goes the argument, but at least they give you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, if you were foolish enough to pay a buck for Robot Monster, you would find it entirely bangless. For a story that involves a sinister alien menace – well, okay, a lumbering extra in a diving helmet and an ape suit – eradicating the entire human race except for one family, the movie contains exactly zero thrills and chills. Ro-Man spends around 43 minutes blundering around the San Fernando Valley chasing after a handful of people who don’t seem all that concerned with having to rebuild the human race, and puts the lie to the notion that these movies could at least do action right. So who cares? Well, you will, sort of. Robot Monster is one of those movies that manages to rise below its incompetence, coming across as so much worse than it has any right to be, even with its fifty-dollar budget: it clearly would have been awful with ten million to spend. Like the oeuvre of Ed Wood, its appeal comes not from being good on any level, but from being so bad that you can’t believe it was actually made. Once Ro-Man starts blabbering about the existential crisis he’s having for no particular reason after having killed three billion people, asking at what point on the graph must and cannot meet, you just shrug and let yourself go along for the ride. You sure as hell aren’t in the presence of greatness, but you’re in the presence of a sort of transcendent badness, and, well, that’s something.

PSYCHO (1960)

Psycho might seem to be an odd fit for a list like this, what with its being an acknowledged classic by a major Hollywood director. Obviously, it's very different from the run of exploitation films. Except that it's conceived as a choice specimen of the form, right down to its toes. Hitchcock was just coming off the lavish production North by Northwest, and the idea of doing a quick, down-and-dirty low budget movie must have appealed to him on a number of levels. But he had also been reading Variety and examining the box office returns of the new independent thriller producers such as William Castle and Roger Corman, and some perverse streak of vanity in him might have compelled him to show that, even though he'd become rich and world famous, he could still grab an audience by the short hairs as well as any punk with a Bolex. After he began to explore the idea of adapting Robert Bloch's novel about a killer based on Ed Gein, his studio, Paramount, helped point him in the right direction by refusing to make the movie because it judged the material to be "repulsive." So Hitchcock funded it through his own company and made it on the Universal lot using the regular crew from his TV series. Hitchcock had also used his TV show to develop a public image as a poker-faced ghoulish comedian, and when the movie was ready for market, he extended that role into a performance as a Castle-like showman, which enabled him to signal to his audience what kind of movie to expect while mostly avoiding spelling out plot points that would have killed the movie's surprises. The movie itself features details, such as the opening scene with Janet Leigh and John Gavin lounging around their motel room in their underwear, that for audiences marked it as part of the exploitation genre, which served the dual purpose of making it seem more "modern" that Hitchcock's lavish, color, big-studio implausibilities and making viewers feel that they knew where they were, the better for Hitchcock to pull the rug out from under them. For Hitchcock, making his version of a cutthroat horror film on the (relative) cheap must have been a kind of intellectual experiment, like making a movie within the confines of a lifeboat or filming Rope in a series of continuous ten-minute shots. Hitchcock would later toy with the idea of making a movie in the streets with hand-held cameras, in imitation of the French New Wave, but instead, for the rest of his career he kept to his big-studio, big-budget methods, with mostly diminishing returns.

SEE! the psychedelic frenzy of Part One! FEEL! the erotic madness of Part Two! TOUCH! the tantalizing terror of Part Three! TASTE! the demonic broth of Part Four! SMELL! the far-out funk of Part Five!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce

Unwatchable Recap: 91-100

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Unwatchable Halftime Report! Yes, we’ve made it halfway through our journey up the IMDb Bottom 100 list and it’s time to look back at all the good times we’ve had so far. It all began on April 3, 2008, when I reported here on an article from The Guardian by Sam Richards, who subjected himself to a handful of titles from the list he says “exists to catalogue films that have been viewed out of error, obligation or last-turkey-in-the-shop desperation.”

As I said upon launching the Unwatchable project on April 28 of last year, “Any moron can sit through a few of these godawful pictures; it takes a special kind of idiot to watch all 100 of them. And I’m here to tell you, loyal Screengrab readers, I am that idiot. For your entertainment and my own detriment, I am going to watch and review them all, starting with #100 and working my way to the top. Of course, the IMDb list is constantly changing based on the whims of the voting public, but I will be sticking with the Bottom 100 I downloaded on the day I decided to tackle this most awe-inspiring task.”

And it’s true, I am still working from that very list. All this week I’ll be offering you the chance to catch up with Unwatchables you may have missed. I’ve already blocked many of these from my memory, so it should be quite a treat for me, too. Let’s begin with Unwatchables # 91-100!

100. Devil Fish. “A bony dolphin trainer, a beer-swilling scientist and the local sheriff join forces to battle a waterlogged monster that doesn’t actually appear to be much of a shark at all, given that it has tentacles. In a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease, the solution they arrive at is to douse the Everglades with gasoline and set it ablaze with flamethrowers.”

99. The Honeymooners. “Drained of all that hilarious domestic violence humor that might prove upsetting to a modern audience (Ralph’s “To the moon, Alice!” is transformed into a lovey-dovey sweet nothing), The Honeymooners is a decidedly mediocre but good-natured family comedy that has no business being on the Bottom 100 list. Ralph says it best: ‘You just a regular UPN sitcom, huh, Alice?’”

98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor. “Of course, this story is only the most threadbare clothesline possible on which to hang as many sessions of roundhouse kicking, neck-snapping and nut-crunching as possible. If you put 100 monkeys in a room with 100 typewriters and asked them all to write a kickboxing movie, 99 of them would come up with this one. But let’s be honest – anyone who watches Kickboxer 4 on purpose is expecting and hoping for only one thing: lots of people getting kicked in the face.”

97. Bolero. “Among its IMDb keywords are ‘Female Nudity,’ ‘Female Frontal Nudity,’ ‘Female Full Frontal Nudity’ and ‘Box Office Flop.’ All of this is accurate.”

96. Track of the Moon Beast. “You might think there’s an unlimited amount of humor to be derived from the story of a man who gets a shard of meteorite imbedded in his skull which causes him to turn into a giant lizard. But you would be wrong.”

95. Marci X. “With its flat television lighting, wokka-wokka music and cast of sitcom actors pitching their performances to the back row of the studio audience, Marci X is a migraine from beginning to end. It’s no wonder Chris Rock rejected it, telling Entertainment Weekly ‘It's the worst script I've ever gotten... I'd have been happier getting an envelope full of anthrax.’ And I’ve seen some of the movies Chris Rock has actually agreed to do, so you know that’s really saying something.”

94. Invasion of the Neptune Men. “The Neptunians – Neptunites? Neptunesians? – emerge from the craft in silvery suits, with slot machines on their heads, and naturally their first impulse is to strangle the small children.”

93. Howling III: The Marsupials. “There’s a bus full of werewolf nuns, a ballet dancer who turns werewolf in mid-performance, a were-skeleton that comes back to life, a leather-boy version of Alfred Hitchcock, a soundtrack full of synthpop power ballads that sound like Beverly Hills Cop rejects, and there’s even Dame Edna, years before her U.S. stardom.”

92. I Accuse My Parents. “This schmuck can’t amuse himself for an hour or so after school, particularly when the hot-to-trot neighbor lady is always dropping by for a drink? It’s about now that we begin to speculate Jimmy may be a little ‘slow.’”

91. Horrors of Spider Island. “Saved from unwatchability by a groovy bikini dance interlude and the exciting conclusion wherein the girls, armed with torches, chase the spider-man into a pit of quicksand. I’ve said it before, but I'll say it again - you just don’t hear much about quicksand anymore.”

Up The Academy: Screengrab Salutes The All-Time Best & Worst Best Picture Winners (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

THE BEST:

UNFORGIVEN (1992)

To my way of thinking, the best Best Pictures are both flawless examples of their genre and also communicate something about the era that produced them. Clint Eastwood’s revisionist Western scores on both counts. Not only does the film offer blue ribbon acting from a Master Class ensemble featuring Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Frances Fisher, Jaimz Woolvett, Richard Harris and the Man With No Name himself, but Unforgiven also draws on the audience’s familiarity with Eastwood’s (and America’s) history of violence to reevaluate those legacies after twelve years of the Republican Party’s '80s go-round with faux-cowboy heroics. The beautifully constructed screenplay by David Webb Peoples is a sharp rebuke to the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Reagan/Bush years (not to mention a fair handful of Eastwood’s earlier films): drunken cowboys in the town of Big Whiskey maim one of the local whores, the whores seek retribution by hiring gunmen to kill the cowboys, and the town’s sadistic sheriff beats and kills the gunmen who show up. In the end, a lot of people are dead, nobody’s better off and justice has not been served. Sadly, the film’s grim portrayal of the futility of violence is just as timely now as it was at the dawn of our last “hope and change” administration.

AMADEUS (1984)

For starters, Amadeus is probably the best of the four other films nominated in 1984 (A Passage To India, The Killing Fields, Places In The Heart and A Soldier's Story), so it passes that basic test. Oddly enough, Amadeus is also one of the few movies that won Best Picture that I'd consider one of the ten best of its year — or at least close — and for a year that included Stranger Than Paradise, Once Upon A Time In America and The Terminator (just for starters), that's not bad at all. Amadeus probably won because it hit a number of reflexive buttons: it's a period costume drama where all the production and costume money is on-screen, it genuflects before Culture in the form of classical music without losing anyone with something truly alienating, it's based on a hit play, and it comes from a respectable, previously-lauded producer-director team. But the reasons Amadeus is actually pretty great have nothing to do with that and everything to do with the typical dry intelligence Milos Forman brought to the film. Forman treats this like a gigantic Brechtian exercise, paying meticulous attention to physical verisimilitude, then blowing it out with the likes of Jeffrey Jones and Tom Hulce — unmistakably American, out-of-place types. As in his later (not as good, still misunderstood) The People Vs. Larry Flynt and Man On The Moon, Forman scrupulously obeys the biopic formula, hitting all the high points of his subject's lives while refusing to shed any light on what made them tick. Point being: who/what could possibly explain that? It drives Salieri crazy that he can't figure out why God would waste his music on a drunken, disrespectful buffoon, but to Forman, that's just par for the course.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971)

Arguably the first action movie to win Best Picture, The French Connection really announced (along with 1969's Midnight Cowboy triumph) a shift in what was considered acceptable award-winning fare; only a few years before, it was all treacly musicals and your occasional "serious" film. (In 1971, it was up against Nicholas And Alexandra, whose makers badly miscalculated the changing zeitgeist at some point.) But it wasn't a permanent shift: The French Connection — absolutely lean, more reliant on atmosphere and street grit than characterization or take-home morals — is as anomalous-seeming a Best Picture winner now as it was then, which speaks badly of the Academy's heavy suet-pudding tastes. (Cue outraged Dark Knight fans here.)

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)

David Lean is perhaps the only filmmaker whose natural inclinations and talents coincided perfectly with exactly the kind of material the Academy responds to: big, splashy physical filmmaking, heavy on conspicuous visual coups and visibly virtuoso acting. As it happens, Lawrence is one of my favorite films, and therefore the most important time the Academy got it right. Lawrence actually is the Best Picture of 1962, a beautiful film that (without getting too heavyhanded about it) uses exterior landscapes as a mirror for its otherwise unknowable protagonist. But surely it helped that it's long, launched Peter O'Toole in an instantly starmaking performance, and somehow managed to avoid taking a single meaningful political stance. Lawrence Of Arabia wears its ambitions plainly in every aspect — title, length, subject matter — but it lives up to them, too.

REBECCA (1940)

Hitchcock’s first American film was a contentious one, as the Master of Suspense famously quarreled with mega-producer David O. Selznick over myriad issues regarding his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel. Such squabbles may have resulted in a film that feels somewhat more conventional than Hitch’s prior British works, but its preoccupation with emotional and psychological traumas nonetheless ultimately helped pave the way for the director’s future daring psychodramas. In Rebecca, Joan Fontaine takes up residence in the Brontë-esque home of her wealthy husband Laurence Olivier, where the specter of his deceased first wife looms large thanks in part to Judith Anderson’s unsettling manor servant, who remains devoted to her dead employer. Although devoid of significant aesthetic inventiveness, the director still generates a sumptuously creepy, unreal atmosphere that’s equally indebted to Wuthering Heights and Val Lewton’s horror classics. A technically superb thriller, it’s also an enduringly resonant depiction of societal expectations for, and demands on, women.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager

Morning Deal Report: Polanski and Belushi, Together at Last

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Apparently some sort of awards nominations were announced this morning. I think you can find the details elsewhere at the Screengrab.

Scorsese and De Niro. Hitchcock and Stewart. Polanski and…Belushi? JIM Belushi? Yes, it’s true, according to The Hollywood Reporter: "Tom Wilkinson and Jim Belushi have joined the cast of Roman Polanski's The Ghost, which begins filming in Berlin on Feb. 4. The movie stars Pierce Brosnan as a former British prime minister and Ewan McGregor as his ghostwriter.”

Marc Webb (500 Days of Summer) will direct “The Spectacular Now, a coming-of-age dramedy based on Tim Tharp's book,” per Variety. "It's somewhere between Sideways, Catcher in the Rye and Ferris Bueller's Day Off," said producer Tom McNulty. Well, that narrows it down.

Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, is back on track following the shooting death of Ruffalo’s brother. “The story, written by Christopher Thornton, follows a paralyzed DJ, struggling to survive on the streets of L.A., who turns to faith healing and mysteriously develops the ability to cure the sick -- although not himself. The DJ then decides to cash in on his gift in exchange for his rock 'n' roll dreams,” per THR.

Related:
Roman Polanski Sees a Ghost
Movies We Missed: My Life Without Me (2003)

Ozsploitation! “Roadgames” (1981)

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Inspired by the terrific new documentary Not Quite Hollywood, the Screengrab is proud to present Ozsploitation!, our own survey of the golden age of Australian drive-in movies. Pop a tube, throw another shrimp on the barbie and try not to chunder.

Richard Franklin’s Roadgames is like Rear Window on wheels. I wish I could take credit for that observation, but I cribbed it from the director himself. Franklin is a self-proclaimed Hitchcock buff; he directed Psycho II, but Roadgames is actually the more Hitchcockian achievement – a zesty soufflé of humor, action, suspense and a dollop of ambiguity. (I stole “soufflé” from Franklin, too – what can I say, the man is an astute appraiser of his own work.) It’s such a fun little flick, I have no idea why I’d never seen it before now.

Stacy Keach reveals a playful side that has eluded me until now as truck driver (or “truckie” as those whimsical Aussies call him) Patrick Quid. Driving a load of pork across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, Quid has no one to talk to except his dingo Boswell. He manages to amuse himself nonetheless, playing harmonica and inventing stories about his fellow travelers of the only highway around. (Because there’s no other route across the continent, he’s always catching up to the same vehicles he’s seen at diners and gas stations along the way.) He’s particular intrigued by a man driving a green van, who he spots poking around a motel garbage dumpster in the wee hours of the morning.

We know something Quid doesn’t, as we’ve already seen this man put on a pair of racing gloves and strangle a naked woman in his motel room. Quid’s suspicions are heightened by a radio broadcast warning of a serial killer in the area. Although regulations forbid him from picking up hitchhikers, he can’t resist. His first passenger, a chatty middle-aged woman, soon develops her own suspicions about Quid. His second, attractive young Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis), proves to be his match in the realm of serial killer theorizing. As they close in on the mystery man in the van, however, she may turn out to be his next victim.

The long road across the Nullarbor is marked by spectacular scenery, small pockets of civilization and a gaggle of oddball characters. Aside from a brief campfire interlude, Franklin keeps the pedal to the metal; memorable set pieces include a game of chicken between Quid and an inexplicably aggressive motorist hauling a boat trailer, as well as the finale in which truck, van and police car all converge in very tight quarters. Curtis, who was still the Queen of Scream at this point in her career, is fine in what turns out to be a fairly small part, but this is Keach’s show all the way – it may be his liveliest, most charismatic performance. As Hitchcock riffs go, I’ll take this one over most of the De Palma catalogue any day.

Previously on Ozsploitation!:
Long Weekend
Turkey Shoot

In Other Blogs, Starring Roger Ebert as The Phantom

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Forget the four decades of movie reviewing, Pulitzer or no. Roger Ebert was clearly put on this earth to blog. His latest entry is a freewheeling reminiscence of his longtime sparring with Gene Siskel as well as a good-humored analysis of his physical appearance, then and now. “What does it feel like to resemble the Phantom of the Opera? You learn to live with it. I've never concerned myself overmuch about how I looked. I got a lot of practice at indifference during my years as the Michelin Man. Yes, years before I acquired my present problems, I was not merely fat, but was universally known as ‘the fat one,’ to distinguish me from ‘the thin one,’ who was Gene Siskel, who was not all that thin, but try telling that to Gene: ‘Spoken like the gifted Haystacks Calhoun tribute artist that you are.’”

Andrew O’Hehir goes Beyond the Multiplex to contemplate the cult of WALL-E. “Like all contemporary parents, I love Pixar, because its movies ingratiate themselves to adults without condescending to children…On the other hand: WTF? WALL-E is a cartoon, dammit. It's a pretty good cartoon, one that blends together a lot of half-baked themes from more serious works of film and literature into a clever pastiche flavored for today's kidult tastes. I liked it fine, and the overreaction in some quarters is not Pixar's or Stanton's fault. But don't insult our intelligence by claiming that it's the best movie of the year or the best animated film ever made or a masterpiece or a mantelpiece. It might be the third-best Pixar movie of the decade. Which, hey, is not nothing.”

Over at The House Next Door, Dan Callahan considers the early work of Carole Lombard. “Even worse than White Woman is Bolero (1934), where Lombard has to try to act and even dance with the wooden George Raft. It’s a dull movie, but it does boast a defining moment for Lombard: she strips down to her slip again, and Raft dares her to dance something for him. Lombard’s face lights up, as if she’s thinking, ‘What the hell,’ (or ‘What the fuck,’ since she was addicted to longshoreman language). She stomps across the screen in her slip and stockings, while Raft and everyone in the audience thinks, ‘This woman must be one of the best lays in the world.’”

At The Auteurs, Glen Kenny wonders whatever happened to James Bond’s sense of humor. “In Dr. No, Connery's Bond was suave and very chilly, his wit exceptionally mordant—as exemplified in the famous kiss-off ‘You've had your six.’ Bond's a little looser in From Russia With Love, and by Goldfinger he's letting the bon-mots fly, from his explanation as to why that brandy is disappointing to his very square observation about how to best listen to the Beatles. But that's not to say that Bond isn't pissed off at the murder of Jill Masterson—he is, and plenty. Here is where the genius of Connery's characterization registers most strongly. Andrew Sarris pegged Connery as a superb physical actor after his purposeful shipboard stride to rescue a near-drowned Tippie Hedren in Hitchcock's Marnie. If, facially and verbally, Connery's Bond gives the impression of a smart cynic, his body language—his bearing, the way he walks, and more—tells a different, more purposeful, story. It's safe to say that no subsequent Bond man, no matter how gifted an actor, ever tried to play that kind of double game.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog offers the 10 Most Accessible Foreign Films of the Last Ten Years, including Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India. “The running time of 3 hrs. 43 min. probably seems like a deterrent, but this Bollywood film really does feel a lot shorter than it is. Really. And anyway its compelling story of an underdog cricket team is familiar enough that you don’t have to pay too much attention if you don’t have the time — though it will be difficult to let your attention stray except for during some of the less-adequately translated musical numbers that aren’t so significant or relatable to most Western viewers. Just think of this film as your typical Hollywood sports movie, except instead of the final game being quickly highlighted in the last 30 minutes, it’s seemingly depicted in its entirety for more than an hour.”

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

B.R. Chopra, 1914-2008

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:15:00 GMT

Bollywood lost one of its most legendary directors today when B.R. Chopra, the commercially successful but often controversial filmmaker who managed to bring a tone of moral seriousness and ethical inquiry to an industry most often given over to frothy, lightweight musical entertainments, passed away at the age of 94. As reported in the New York Times and elsewhere, Chopra's death from natural causes was announced by his son, also a film producer and a member of what has grown to be a prominent family in the Indian film industry.

Originally trained as a journalist and setting out to support a large family with only his determination to succeed as a filmmaker, crag-faced Baldev Raj Chopra initially encountered failure in his film career, helming a few forgettable romantic comedies before scoring mild success with popular thrillers that showed the influence of Hitchcock. It was in the 1950s that Chopra's career truly blossomed, mirroring the success of the industry itself; and, as time went on, he proved himself capable of scoring popular successes with traditionally-minded audiences while still seeking to push the boundaries of what was allowed in Indian film of the day.

Chopra's best-known film was Naya Daur, a 1957 musical that played up the conflict between technocratic urbanism and rural agricultural life at a time when India's leadership was pushing for more urban development and a transition from old-style community values. Though he worked with many of the biggest Bollywood stars, he sometimes made a statement by eschewing big names, such as in the 1980 drama Insaf ka Tarazu (dealing with the often-taboo subject of rape); he likewise bucked the Bollywood trend of featuring songs in every film in movies like the popular courtroom drama Kanoon. Though he directed his last film in 1992, he continued to act as a producer for his won B.R. Films company until 2006, when he released another controversial film -- Baabul -- which challenged the treatment of women in traditional Indian society. His most well-known work in the west, oddly, was not a film, but a television series: in 1988, he produced a serialization of the Hindu epic Mahabharata, which found an audience in the U.S. thanks to being syndicated by PBS.

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Screengrab Presents: The 25 Greatest Horror Films of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978)

Fuck a Zack Snyder remake – no other zombie movie, not even by George Romero, will ever surpass the original Dawn of the Dead. How do I love this gory, nasty, and surprisingly moving masterpiece of terror? Let me count the ways. First of all, while it can’t surpass the closed-up creepiness of the original Night of the Living Dead, it opens it up to staggering effect and makes it a truly apocalyptic horror film. Second, Night had always been projected as a one-off; it was Dawn that made zombies into one of the famous monsters of filmdom, that transformed Romero’s dead-eyed flesh-eaters into beings with their own mythology and internal logic. By doing so, it didn’t just launch a franchise – it launched an entire universe, a cultural archetype with as much meaning and possibility as vampires, werewolves – or angels. Third, it’s tight as hell, incredibly suspenseful, and remarkably well-acted, with the technical difficulties of filming something so ambitious on a shoestring overcome in surprising and effective ways. Fourth, like all great horror movies, it gives us an essential human drama at its center; we care about the story because we care about Stephen, Peter, Roger and Francine. Fifth, it’s a deeply satirical exercise, the first attempt – and probably the most successful – by Romero to mock us by showing us the way a lot of people probably see us: zombies as cultural/political metaphors. And sixth…well, it’s about a bunch of flesh-eating zombies running amok in a shopping mall. And, to use the highfalutin language of film criticism, that’s awesome.

4. PSYCHO (1960)

One of the running jokes around the opulent Screengrab offices is that no matter what lists we come up with, there’s some way to fit Psycho onto them. I’ve personally written up so many aspects of it, I feel like I should get a screenplay credit. But Psycho is definitely responsible for two major accomplishments – both, to me, indisputable, and both decidedly mixed blessings to cinema – that make it especially suitable for this list. The first is that it effectively killed off noir. The highly stylized crime dramas were already on their way out, but Psycho, by cribbing so many of their visual cues but utterly annihilating (literally, at least in the case of Marion Crane) their doomed criminal anti-heroes and shifting the focus from ordinary criminals to extraordinary psychopaths, Psycho put noir in the ground as a dominant method of storytelling. The second is that it ushered in a new kind of villain: setting the tone for the slasher movies of 20 years later and the torture porn of 40 years later, Psycho replaced the notion of the murderer as a relatable character – a villain, surely, but one driven by rational urges like greed, lust, revenge, or envy – with that of the psychopath. Gone was the moral ambiguity of crime dramas past, and in its place was the appeal of the villain who was totally alien: who was intriguing because we could not recognize ourselves in him, because he did things we literally could not imagine. There’s no denying that these two transformations did more harm than good, and ushered in legions of terrible movies, but they’re also further testimonies to how great, and how transformative, Psycho really was.

3. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

George A. Romero has directed a number of great films, but his legacy will surely be his contributions to the zombie horror subgenre. With five Dead films under his belt and yet another on the way, Romero has defined the modern concept of big-screen zombies. Many consider his masterpiece to be 1978’s Dawn of the Dead, with its scathing critique of our consumerist impulses, but for sheer thrills, nothing can top the original Night of the Living Dead. The plot is simple, almost crude -- a group of strangers barricade themselves in an abandoned home in order to defend themselves against an infestation of zombies roaming the countryside. But working from this rudimentary premise, Romero fashioned a scruffier, scarier counterpart to Hitchcock’s The Birds, another film that mined horror from a sudden, uncanny plague unleashed by nature. In addition, Romero’s hardscrabble shooting style -- his black and white 16mm cinematography was necessitated by the film’s $100,000 budget -- helped to change the way horror movies could be made. With the runaway success of Night, horror began to move away from the elegant, big-budget productions to more quick-and-dirty scares, paving the way for the likes of Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, and many others. But none of this would matter if Night wasn’t scary as hell, which it definitely is, in large part because Romero so skillfully orchestrates the breakdown of society that results from the zombie plague. With the line between living and dead so thoroughly obliterated, nothing else can be sacred -- government, law, morality, and perhaps most memorably, the institution of the family. When a couple’s infected daughter suddenly turns on her parents, it’s clear that anything is possible in Romero’s world, which is perhaps the scariest notion of all.

2. FREAKS (1932)

Having launched a legend the year before with the Bela Lugosi talkie of Dracula, old Hollywood hand Tod Browning decided to quit fucking around: this time, he was serious. This time, the horror felt by his audience wasn’t going to be creepy or sensual: it was going to be repulsive and visceral. And he was going to make them pay for it. The essence of some of the greatest horror stories is making the audience question who, exactly, the monsters really are, and, by peopling its cast with authentic touring circus freaks and then making them the victims of the greedy, lying “normals”, Freaks made it crystal clear: they are us. Some have accused the film of exploiting its cast, but that’s a knee-jerk reaction that not only ignores the movie’s moral complexity (and the fact that the wronged freaks exact a chilling, and utterly deserved, vengeance on their tormentors), but also the fact that for many of the performers, it was the biggest paycheck they’d ever have. They were also treated well by Browning and his cast, something that couldn’t be said for the studio (which wouldn’t allow most of them to dine in the cafeteria) or many of its stars (who refused to star alongside “sideshow exhibitions”). The knowledge of how the picture was made only serves to enhance its powerful condemnation of intolerance -- which was even stronger, just as the ending was even bleaker, before the studio forced cuts. Even today, over 75 years later, Freaks remains one of the most disturbing films ever released by a major Hollywood studio – just as Tod Browning had intended.

1. THE SHINING (1980)

One of the big mistakes many horror filmmakers make is to over-explain the mysterious forces at work in their films. Ask anyone who’s watched the misguided “explanation scene” that George Romero belatedly added to some of the DVD releases of Night of the Living Dead -- usually, not knowing exactly why the monsters are attacking is much more effective than knowing. No horror movie has captured this idea better than The Shining. Stanley Kubrick memorably stated of 2001 that he “wanted to ask more questions than we had answers,” and he used the same tactic in bringing Stephen King’s bestseller to the screen. Naturally, this annoyed many viewers, including King himself, who didn’t cotton to the liberties Kubrick took with his work. But no matter -- it’s the film’s ambiguity that makes it so disturbing. Why are there two different Gradys? What’s up with the guy in the animal suit? And what exactly happens to Jack at the end of the movie? Wisely, Kubrick withholds the answers, allowing the disorientation that results from these scenes to go unresolved. In addition, the film also tells a more human-sized horror story, of a family that’s barely holding together even before the ghosts arrive on the scene -- a man whose eerie formality keeps his demons uneasily at bay as long as he stays off the sauce, a boy overwhelmed by his supernatural gift (curse?) and still scarred by an act of drunken violence by his father, and the woman who can’t handle the idea of losing either of them. All the while, Kubrick practically hypnotizes us with his filmmaking brilliance -- those Steadicam shots! -- meaning that even when The Shining becomes difficult to watch, it’s impossible to look away.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six & Seven

Contributors: Jack-o-Leonard Pierce, Mauled Clark

DVD Digest for October 14, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week brings plenty of thrills on Blu-Ray and some interesting arthouse releases coming to DVD. Oh, and some guy with a whip.

Conundrum of the Week: Terrence Malick’s The New World is one of my favorite movies of all time. So why am I not more excited about this week’s release of the “Extended Cut” of the film? You’d think that I would welcome the opportunity to see even more of the film, to luxuriate in its irresistible Malick-ness. Yet I find myself torn. On the one hand, I’m encouraged by the fact that Malick re-cut the film himself, which leads me to believe that maybe he just needed more time to get his vision fine-tuned to his exact specifications (I still yearn, in vain I fear, for his 6-hour cut of The Thin Red Line). But it was the theatrical cut that I fell in love with in the first place. So why can’t the boys at Warner just do what Universal did last week and release all three existing cuts of The New World in one handy box set? Now, there would be an occasion worth celebrating. I know, I know- I’m thinking about it too much. But that’s what they pay me for, after all…

Also notable this week is MGM’s Alfred Hitchcock Premiere Collection, which contains eight Hitchcock titles from their library and features many new commentary tracks and archival material including Hitchcock being interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich and Francois Truffaut. The big titles in the set are Rebecca, Spellbound, and Notorious, each of which went out of print on Criterion DVD a few years ago, and which are now available separately as well as in the set. Other titles in the set are The Paradine Case, Sabotage, Young and Innocent, Lifeboat, and The Lodger. Other classics coming to DVD include: a new release of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (Criterion), Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (Koch), Capricorn One (Lionsgate), and the 15th Anniversary of Chaplin (Lionsgate), which features what’s still Robert Downey Jr.’s sole Oscar nomination to date.

The week’s biggest recent release on DVD is, of course, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Paramount, also Blu-Ray), a movie which I enjoyed but which disappointed a number of fans including Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But if you’re one of the Indy naysayers, check out one or more of this week’s crop of new indies: Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (Sony, also Blu-Ray), the Genghis Kahn origin story Mongol (Warner, also Blu-Ray), the Cannes-anointed The Edge of Heaven (Strand Releasing), and this year’s Golden Bear-winner at Berlin, Elite Squad (Genius Productions). Or if you’ve got a little too much cash jangling around in your pockets, you can always either buy The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie (Universal) or drive by your local Best Buy and throw $20 out of your car window, both of which produce about the same effect.

This week’s TV on DVD releases include: CSI Season 8 (Paramount), Back to You Season 1 (Universal), Nash Bridges Season 1 (Paramount), and The Unit Season 3 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s releases are a fairly action-packed bunch, including thrills of all sorts. For true-crime thrills, try Eastern Promises (Universal), American Gangster (Universal), or Casino (Universal). If you’ve got a taste for blood, give Interview With the Vampire (Warner) a spin. For adventure and romance, there’s always the double feature of Romancing the Stone (Fox) and Jewel of the Nile (Fox). If you like your action spiced liberally with cyberpunk, you probably don’t need me to tell you about this week’s release of The Ultimate Matrix Collection (Warner). For some Halloween chills, check out Poltergeist (Warner). And if you don’t really care for good movies, Constantine (Warner) should satisfy your movie-watching urges just fine.

DVD Digest for October 7, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:00:00 GMT

It’s a massive week for classic films, and a surprisingly good one for new releases too, once you get past the big Hollywood titles…

DVD of the Week: There was no small amount of competition for this spot, not merely because of the jaw-dropping number of classic titles being release but also due to one of TV’s best sitcoms seeing its most recent season bow on DVD store shelves. But with all the great stuff that’s hitting stores this week, to my eyes there was only one logical choice- Universal’s Touch of Evil 50th Anniversary Edition. It would be one thing if this DVD was simply a cash-in, a new pressing of the previously released 1998 cut of the film. But joining the “restored” version of the film are both the original theatrical cut and an additional “preview version”, both of which are being released on DVD for the first time. In addition, there are plenty of extras both old and new, including commentary tracks to correspond with each of the three available versions of the movie. What more could a Touch of Evil fan ask for? How about a reproduction of the legendary Orson Welles memo that led to the 1998 restoration? Yep, that’s in here too. I don’t normally double-dip my DVDs, but I’m definitely going to make the upgrade this time.

But wait, there’s more! Disney is releasing a 2-disc “Platinum Edition” of their 1959 classic Sleeping Beauty, packed with plenty of extras for both family audiences and animation buffs. Criterion is releasing two more films from the French master of crime dramas, Jean-Pierre Melville- Le Doulos (starring Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Le Deuxieme Souffle (with Lino Ventura). There are new 2-disc special editions of three of Hitchcock’s most iconic classics- Psycho, Rear Window, and Vertigo (all Universal). And Ray Harryhausen is representin’ here too, with a new DVD of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 50th Anniversary Edition (Sony, also Blu-Ray), plus the Ray Harryhausen Giftset (Sony, also Blu-Ray), which includes previously-released editions of 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, plus collectible Ymir figurine.

Also, like musicals? Then pick up Fox’s The Alice Faye Collection Volume 2, which contains Hollywood Cavalcade, The Great American Broadcast, Four Jills in a Jeep, Rose of Washington Square, and Hello, Frisco, Hello (also available separately). And with the winter months coming sooner than you’d think, you can start traveling in the comfort of your own home with The Michael Palin Collection (Warner), which collects the amiable Python’s adventures Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Great Railways Journeys, Sahara and Himalaya into one handy box set. Finally, Warner is releasing two very different classic titles, The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Watership Down Deluxe Edition. So yeah, something for everyone.

But wait, there’s more! Two of my favorite films from the first half of 2008 are hitting the streets today- Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (Genius Productions) and Stuart Gordon’s Stuck (Image Entertainment). And two other acclaimed indies are getting released as well, The Visitor (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray) starring Screengrab fave Richard Jenkins, and Boy A (Genius Productions). And, oh yeah… The Happening (Fox, also Blu-Ray) and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Although I’m not sure I want to know anybody who’d buy these instead of any of the aforementioned classics.

This week’s TV on DVD release is 30 Rock Season 2 (Universal), which finds Liz, Jack, Tracy, Kenneth the Page, and the rest of the TGS gang taking a trip to MILF Island, among other misadventures. Also this week: Brotherhood Season 2 (Paramount), How I Met Your Mother Season 3 (Fox), and The Simpsons Season 11 (Fox).

Finally, this week’s Halloween-heavy Blu-Ray only releases include: The Amityville Horror (MGM), Beetlejuice 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition (Warner), Body Heat (Warner), Young Frankenstein (Fox), Carrie (MGM), and Otis (Warner). No word on whether Carré Otis is somehow involved.

Take Five: Bad Cops

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Neil LaBute's new movie, Lakeview Terrace, opens this Friday. Critical opinion is still split, but critical opinion will have its say soon enough about whether the director is returning to the promising form he showed in In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, or whether he's just cranking out a cheap thriller because he wants to buy a new boat. Lakeview Terrace finds Samuel L. Jackson, Hollywood's default angry black man, in the role of a mean-tempered, menacing L.A. cop who takes offense to an interracial couple (played by Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) who move in next door to him. The idea of crooked cops has always been an appealing one to people who write thrillers; the idea of the very people charged with protecting the innocent being the ones who might hurt them has powerful appeal, and plenty of filmmakers -- Alfred Hitchcock comes immediately to mind -- have put their ambivalent feelings about the police front and center in their movies. By the same token, however, due to the strict content restrictions of post-Code Hollywood, it was a taboo subject for decades; with very few exceptions, a crooked or evil cop was one of the very few things it was absolutely verboten to show on screen. When the code era passed, almost as if to make up for lost time, dozens of scriptwriters and directors began to explore the idea of the cop who betrayed the ideals he was sworn to uphold, and the bad cop genre was born. Here's five of the best.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

John Huston's masterful ensemble picture about a daring, carefully calculated jewel theft gone awry is one of the greatest noir films ever made, with an incredible cast (headed by Sterling Hayden as the iron-willed thug Dix Handley and Sam Jaffe as the brilliant crook Doc Riedenschneider) and a taut, fatalistic atmosphere that keeps you glued to the screen. But it's also a fine example of how movies had to creep around the concept of the bad cop at the height of the Hays Code: although it's made clear that Barry Kelley's Lt. Ditrich is on the make, and that his accepting bribes from hoods helps crime flourish, the idea of a crooked policeman being so plainly presented ran afoul of the Code. So a scene was filmed in which his incorruptible chief set him on the straight an narrow, and the end coda assures the viewer that such crooked cops are an aberration that will always be found out and punished, rather than the norm.

THE GODFATHER (1972)

The Hays Code had been more or less dead in the water for a dozen years by the time Francis Ford Copolla started filming his epic American gangster movie, and those dozen years had seen a lot of wearing away of the notion of the policemen as a friendly, helpful, vigilant and unimpeachable protector of the innocent. But a few taboos still remained on screen, and The Godfather did its not insubstantial bit to overcome them. In the course of the Corleone family's conflict with the slimy drug dealer Virgil Solozzo, Tom Hagen warns that "The Turk" cannot be gotten to because he enjoys the protection of New York police captain McCluskey (played by Sterling Hayden, acting the flip side of his Asphalt Jungle character) -- and that it is simply not done to kill a cop. When young Michael Corleone, who had previously been the victim of McCluskey's bullying, argues "Where does it say you can't kill a cop?", and points out that Hayden is a dirty cop on the make with his fingers in the drug racket, he's not just talking to the family -- he's talking to the audience.

MANIAC COP (1988)

William Lustig's bizarre little thriller, combining traditional police thriller elements with a sadistic slice of slasher-era horror, was the last movie you'd expect to start a franchise. But so it did, and in the the process launched the career of the hulking, iron-jawed Robert Z'dar. The sequels are generally not worth watching, but the original Maniac Cop -- in which a serial killer dressed as an NYPD patrol officer starts preying on innocent victims -- it a remarkably tight and rather exciting (if extremely lurid) piece of cinema that more than justifies its cult reputation. As a director, Lustig doesn't waste time or film, and the movie carries on at a deadly, involving clip; it's abetted by tons of fine performances from respectable character actors like Sheree North, Bruce Campbell, and original That Guy!/friend of the Screengrab Tom Atkins.

BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant was, at the time of its release, what it still is today: an atom bomb of bad-cop movies. Harvey Keitel, at the peak of his "I must appear naked in every movie I make" phase, plays a nameless New York police detective who is far and away the worst portrayal of a policeman in cinematic history: a brutal, violent drunk, a drug addict, a crook, a thief, a gambling addict, and a whoremonger. But this isn't just shock cinema: Keitel's Lieutenant is not just the worst big-screen cop imaginable, he's also, in many ways, the most complex. Ferrara throws Keitel into a deep, dark hole because he wants to show him the way out of it. Bad Lieutenant is a terrific film, which is why the as-yet-unconfirmed rumors that Werner Herzog is going to remake it with Nicolas Cage in the title role are so bewildering.

TRAINING DAY (2001)

Antoine Fuqua's nasty 2001 Los Angeles gang story hasn't held up spectacularly well in the years since it was made. Co-star Ethan Hawke seems out of place; the plot doesn't hold up particularly strongly, the tone wanders all over the place, and though it's quite well made, it's never spectacular. What does hold up, however, is Denzel Washington's electrifying performance as Alonzo, a narcotics officer so deep on the take that he barely recognizes -- or cares -- what side he's on. In the annals of crooked cop movies, it stands alongside Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, and skillfully illustrates the way that a bad man can justify his evil by thinking that he's doing good. The role earned Washington his second acting Oscar and his first Best Actor; though he'd deserved it for Malcolm X, this was no mere compensatory gesture, but a well-earned recognition of a stunning performance.

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Coming Soon: A Screengrab Salute To Movie Trailers (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We were going to continue our Back To School salute with this week’s Top Ten list, but thought we should pause for a moment to pay tribute to Don LaFontaine, the king of movie trailer voiceover talent (who died on September 1) with a list of some of our favorite coming attractions.

This is a strange subject, perhaps, for a Top Ten(-ish) List, since many people regard previews as nothing more than glorified commercials that give away all the good parts, annoying time wasters before the movie you really wanted to see (or, at best, a last minute chance to rush out and get popcorn without missing anything important).

As for me, I sometimes go to movies I’m not even all that excited about just to get myself a good dose of coming attraction action. Trailers are like a perfect little ADD film festival: four or five upcoming releases boiled down to their purest essence in high velocity speedballs of action, music and memorable sound bites designed to goose my anticipation of movies I’m looking forward to or draw my attention to unheralded films I might otherwise have missed.

Most of the time, though, previews allow me to vicariously enjoy all the best moments of flicks like Death Race and Disaster Movie without requiring me to actually sit through them, thus expanding my cinematic horizons while saving wear and tear on both my ass and my wallet.

So here’s a quick Screengrab preview of coming attractions: next week, The Top College Movies of All Time!

And now...on with our feature presentation.

DON LAFONTAINE: THE VOICE

The man...the myth...the trailers. Hard to choose just one LaFontaine original to write about, so this seemed appropriate. But as far as individual coming attraction previews go, there’s no better place to start than with...

The trailer for THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)

In a previous Screengrab list, I wrote: “After the pure, cinematic orgasm of Star Wars blew my pre-pubescent mind beyond any hope of repair, even The Empire Strikes Back was something of a let-down (although watching the teaser trailer for the sequel during one of the theatrical re-releases of the original may stand as the most exciting two minutes of my entire movie-going life).” Allow me to elaborate, for those who were NOT 12-year-old boys in 1979: I had Star Wars sheets, a Star Wars poster above my bed and roughly 1200 plastic Star Wars figures, vehicles, playsets and little tiny guns in my toy chest. I’d seen Star Wars theatrically at least a dozen times, and I’d already read the screenplay, the novelization AND the Marvel Comics adaptation. I knew every frame of film, line of dialogue and Ben Burtt sound effect by heart. And then, in the Year of Our Lord 1979, they re-released THE BEST FILM EVER once again into theaters...only THIS time with the promise of a trailer at the end for the long and desperately awaited sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. And so I paid my parents’ money yet again, and watched Luke blow up the Death Star yet again, and then...at last...the music surged, a brand NEW logo in that funky Star Wars font drifted into view...and...well, the rest was such an undiluted rush of adrenalized oxytocin bliss I essentially disappeared into a barely cognizant state of pure sensation usually reserved for ketamine addicts and William Hurt’s character in Altered States. I only began to process the experience on the second or third viewing of the trailer (following my 14th or 15th viewings of Star Wars)...but, in a nutshell, seeing Luke, Leia, Han Solo and the rest busting free of scenes I knew like Catholic liturgy to suddenly act out BRAND NEW scenes, in BRAND NEW vests and hairdos was equivalent to waking up and discovering the sky was suddenly green and ice cream was a breakfast food. Reminiscing on the embarrassing geekiness of my pre-pubescent obsession (and, uh, this entire blog entry), I can fully empathize with the new generation of kids who waited up ‘til midnight in full Harry Potter drag to snag their Deathly Hallows hardcovers the second they went on sale...and I even (almost) forgive George Lucas for Jar-Jar Binks and (ugh) Stinky the Hutt and all the future disappointments that eventually followed that one glorious trailer.

The trailers for INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), TWISTER (1996) & THE PERFECT STORM (2000)

And then, of course après Star Wars, le deluge. It may not be fair to blame George Lucas (and/or Steven Spielberg) for double-handedly ending the glorious era of ‘70s filmmaking, but the Midas-fingered directors certainly helped to usher in the current era of commerce driven “event” movies. But unlike the aforementioned Empire Strikes Back trailer, which enthralled my pre-pubescent soul while promoting an actual movie worth seeing, many of today’s “event” trailers have become stand-alone short subjects far superior to the films they ostensibly advertise. Independence Day may not have been a great movie, but the trailer (with its exploding White House, embattled New York and stirring call to arms by a faux-macho American president) was certainly a grabber (and, in retrospect, an eerie pre-post-9/11 propaganda film). The same CGI highlight-reel approach, featuring at least one big compelling “gotcha!” moment -- like the glimpse of that giant wave in The Perfect Storm preview or the truck (or is it a tractor?) flying right at the audience in the final seconds of the Twister trailer -- has become an art form unto itself in recent years, not unlike a carnival barker spiel far more entertaining than whatever the unwary are likely to find if they actually buy a ticket and step inside the tent.

The trailer for ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and this freaky-ass trailer for VIDEODROME (1983)

But, of course, mainstream blockbusters aren’t the only productions that generate trailers as good or better than the films they promote. With no stars or Burger King tie-in promotions to aid them, B-movies and indies have always lived or died by their posters and trailers. The 1950s was a golden age of schlock movie previews (like this one for Robot Monster), with all the wooden acting and dull exposition stripped down to just the juicy monster money shots. Meanwhile, indies prefer to entice with their critical raves, film fest appearances, and/or (in the case of this Videodrome teaser) a freaky, inexplicable smörgåsbord of sight and sound compelling enough to lure audiences into uncharted waters if only to find out what the hell is going on...even when said imagery bears little relation to actual scenes from the movie.

The trailer for BUBBLE (2005)

If you were a big-name director who’d just made a low-budget film with no stars in a town most people couldn’t locate on a map, how would you sell it? If you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’d break pretty much every rule of trailer-making. This brilliant spot for Bubble contains exactly none of the following: voiceover, shots of the actors, plot summary, or critical or festival notices. Heck, there’s barely even a human presence at all, aside from the “Another Steven Soderbergh Experience” credit at the very end. Instead, Soderbergh gives us a montage taken from the inside of a doll factory (the film’s primary setting), with isolated doll parts progressively taking the final shape of the dolls. All this set to a jaunty yet creepy orchestral piece (anybody know where it’s from?), giving the proceedings an eerie feel. In the context of the story, the montage has an air of hopelessness -- are we merely dolls slapped together by an uncaring hand? -- but taken on its own merits, it’s a brilliant bit of salesmanship, a distinctive trailer for a movie that otherwise might fall quickly under the radar.

The trailer, website, etc. for THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)

It figures that The Blair Witch Project would have made good use of the fleeting-glimpse concept that has been at the heart of so many great trailers; after all, it was at the heart of the movie, too. The trailer's real innovation was to combine a tried-and-true gimmick that linked it to such films as Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and even Fargo -- the deliberate confusion as to whether this was a "true" story and what was then still a new idea, the use of a promotional web site -- and really work that sucker in a way that no one ever had before. By using the trailer to whet the viewer's curiosity and then flashing the site's URL with its implicit promise to provide more information at the click of a mouse, Blair Witch really fuzzed the line between hype and hoax, and in the process served up an all-encompassing promotional campaign that may have been more fun than the movie itself.

The trailer for THE BIRDS (1963)

This sinister mini-movie – a twisted take on the educational short film – may be the most clever theatrical trailer ever produced. Alfred's macabre sense of humor is on full display here, and he draws out the gag just a little too long, making the audience comfortable before -- gaa! scary birds! The Birds never explains why all the world's winged creatures suddenly revolt, which only adds to the horror. This trailer's answer? They were just tired of being made into chicken dinners and fancy hats.

Click Here for Part 2!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Gwynne Watkins

OST: "Blue Velvet"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 22:45:00 GMT

We've discussed a few great pairings between director and composer in this space before: the energetic, dynamic films of Sergio Leone, accompanied by the postmodernist, propulsive music of Ennio Morricone; the accomplished, thrilling work of Alfred Hitchcock, paired with the inventive, restless music of Bernard Herrmann; and others. Today we're going to look at one of the great film partnerships at its very inception: the mystefying, surreal films of David Lynch and the eerily gorgeous music of Angelo Badalamenti that frequently accompanies them. Blue Velvet was the first of a creative partnership that would last for two decades (and arguably reach its zenith in the Twin Peaks soundtrack) but this is where it all began in 1986.

Like a lot of the best collaborations, the one between David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti (who, despite the florid name, hails from the Mediterranean clime of Brooklyn) almost didn't happen. Mixing as it did a great deal of original score, all written by Badalamenti, and rights-managed classic rock and pop songs, the soundtrack to Blue Velvet was almost scuttled early on by clearance issues. In particular, the title track, as sung by Bobby Vinton, proved costlier to license than the studio would allow, so Badalamenti recorded his own sound-alike version -- before getting news that Vinton himself was willing to re-record it (albeit two registers lower, thanks to age's effect on his pipes). That didn't quite work out either, and they were faced with the legal and aesthetic problems of going with the copycat, until, finally, the studio decided to finally pony up for the original. Roy Orbison likewise held out permissions for "In Dreams" until the last moment, and Lynch, who'd been trying for months to secure the rights to This Mortal Coil's "Song to the Siren", eventually had to give up when the band wouldn't budge on giving him the licence. (Ironically, Balalamenti's replacement song turned out to be one of the most moving and effective pieces in the score.)

"In Dreams" is perhaps the finest example of Blue Velvet's stunning use of classic songs given a rich new dimension by out-of-context placement, even more so than the title track. Once seen, Dean Stockwell crooning the number in a freakish lip-synch as Frank Booth rampages in front of him changes the meaning of the song forever -- this a decade before Quentin Tarantino became famous for doing much the same thing. However, it's Badalamenti's original music that's the most powerful and shattering. Lynch, who'd been listening to a great deal of Shostakovich while writing the script for Blue Velvet, used the Russian composer as an earmark to guide Badalamenti, who ended up incorporating quotes from the 15th Symphony into the finished material, but while it has elements of the great Russian musical themes of beauty and tragedy, the score is all Badalamenti -- soaked in atmosphere, powerful but never overpowering, and deeply strange without ever calling excess attention to itself. Combined with the wonderful classic songs on the soundtrack, it makes for a great, if always slightly unsettling, listening experience.

BEST TRACKS: Curiously, due to copyright issues, some versions of the Blue Velvet soundtrack don't feature any version of the title song -- Vinton's or anyone else's. However, it's easy to find one that does, and it combines with Roy Orbison's otherworldly "In Dreams" for one of the most stunning one-two punches in the history of pop on film. Amongst Badalamenti's original score compositions, the standout is "Mysteries of Love", his collaboration with partern Julee Cruse, which replaced (and improved upon) "Song to the Siren". Also noteworthy is the mysterious, brooding main title track, the elegaic "Blue Star", and the screeching, slashing, almost atonal "Jeffrey's Dark Side", which recalls Bernard Herrmann at his best.

OST: "Psycho"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann was one of the most legendary film composers of all time. One of his first major compositions was the score to The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which he showed both his innovative approach and his playfully subversive nature by by double-tracking a violin to play a jaw-droppingly complex rendition of "Pop Goes the Weasel", and then claiming the solo was the work of a teenaged violin prodigy he'd discovered. He composed a number of memorable movie scores over the years, from the towering, epic sweep of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (his very first project) to the moody, dark tension of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (his very last). But it is with Alfred Hitchcock's name that Herrmann's will be foreever linked.

Hitchcock knew he was playing with dynamite when he made Psycho. The movie that buried noir and ushered in the age of the maniacal slasher was a risky venture for him on many levels: with its shocking violence, infamous mid-film twist, and horror plot, it was a massive deviation from the big-budget hit mysteries that had made so much money for his studio bosses in the late 1950s. Fearing disaster, Hitch -- who was nothing if not determined -- tried as much as possible to make the film on the cheap, and he wasn't afraid to capitalize on personal relationships to do so. Some stories have it that he strong-armed Herrmann, who had turned in incredibly monumental work for him before on such movies as The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and Vertigo; but Herrmann wasn't one to be cowed so easily. He agreed to work on the soundtrack for Psycho at less than his normal pay, but Herrmann -- a rarity amongst film composers insofar as he retained near-total creative control over the final product of his labors -- made it clear he was going to do things his way. Most famously, he ignored Hitchcock's foremost prerogative when writing the score: the director insisted that, for maximum shock value, there be total silence on the soundtrack during the murders, most especially the infamous shower scene.

Luckily for generations of moviegoers, Bernard Herrmann chose to completely disregard this directive, and, when Hitchcock raised a stink, Herrmann insisted that he view the scene with the music he'd written intact. If Hitchcock didn't agree that the music improved the scene instead of distracting from it, then he'd relent. Hitchcock agreed, and, as has been every one of the tens of millions who have seen Psycho since then, he was blown away by how perfect was the juxtaposition of music and visuals. Since then, it's become one of the true classics in the history of movie scoring; Herrmann's brilliant decision to use only the string section of his orchestra for the music, with the only low-end being provided by bass and cello, was inspired and set the standard for high-pitched, shrieking instrumentation as the default for horror films. It also spawned hosts of imitators and 'tributes' over the years (and none proved more determined than Brian De Palma, who, mirroring his own obsession with Hitchcock, used subtle variants of the music in both Carrie and Dressed to Kill). Very few soundtracks in motion picture history so reflect the personality of their creator than does Bernard Herrmann's work -- unnerving, brilliant, raw, and determined -- than does Psycho.

BEST TRACKS: It's impossible to even discuss Psycho -- the movie or the soundtrack -- without discussing the music from the notorious shower scene. (It's called "The Murder", by the way.) As other critics have mentioned, it's almost unfair to call it a piece of music; it's just the sound made by every string section in every orchestra in the world as they warm up. And yet by placing it in context, Herrmann transforms this ordinary sound into one of the most chilling pieces of music in history, and sets the tone for hundreds, maybe thousands, of future citematic murders. Not bad for a piece of music that's barely a minute long; and it's even more astonishing when you consider that, on an album of dozens of short pieces, it virtually defines the score's less-is-more aesthetic by being one of the longer pieces on the album! Still, this wouldn't be one of the greatest film scores of all time if it was simply one minute-long piece of genius; there's much more to love here, including the memorable title track ("Prelude", in which eerie swirls of strings leap and tangle with one another over the unforgettable Saul Bass title sequence), which is so well-loved that Stuart Gordon lifted it wholesale for the opening to Re-Animator. Other strong tracks include the tragic, melancholy "The Body"; the creepy, tense "Cabin 10", and the wailing, cacaphonous avant-gardeism of "The Cellar". A must-have score from a movie where almost all participants were at the tops of their games.

Video of the Day: Hitchcock in Hitchcock

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Strange as it may seem, Brian De Palma is not the most slavish imitator of Alfred Hitchcock in the movie business today. That title now belongs to M. Night Shyamalan, who has long since proved that anything Hitchcock could do, he could do bigger -- and worse. His twist endings are more predictable and disappointing; his plots are more pulpish and implausible; his thrills are sparser and fewer between; and even his cameos are more pompous and alienating than Hitch could ever have dreamed. Of course, where Hitchcock could never hope to equal Shyamalan's groundbreaking work in his own movies of annoying and distracting the viewer, what he lacked in chutzpah, he compensated for in sheer volume. Hitch appeared in some two dozen of his own films, including these 14 from the Hitchcock Collection DVD set.

Too bad this one doesn't contain Hitchcock's cleverly carried off cameo in Lifeboat. M. Night Shyamalan may be an egomaniac, but even he's not ballsy enough to give himself a cameo in a movie entirely set in a damaged life raft floating aimlessly around the Atlantic Ocean.

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

In Other Blogs Special: The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Our regular weekly In Other Blogs column was on holiday hiatus last week, but a friend of the Screengrab has alerted us to a blogular feature that our loyal readers should be made aware of as soon as possible. (And if you are already aware of it, please just humor us.) A staple of any self-respecting cineaste’s library is the 1967 coffee table book Hitchcock/Truffaut, in which one of the leading lights of the French New Wave conducts a series of in-depth interviews with the Hollywood master covering his entire body of work. (Having no self-respect myself, I’ve always just read copies owned by friends while using their bathroom facilities. Perhaps you didn’t need to know that.)

The blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats is running an ongoing series (up to 20 installments as of this writing) called The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes. And that’s exactly what it is: the raw tapes of the Alfred Hitchcock interview sessions conducted by Francois Truffaut with the aid of translator Helen Scott. Even if you don’t foresee yourself wading through every one of the entries, it’s well worth dipping your toe in once or twice, if only for the you-are-there factor. The awkward pauses, interrupted translations, odd snorts and grunts and occasional chewing of food – it’s all there, along with the occasional fresh insight. As you’ll see, blogger Tom Sutpen provides commentary for the early entries, but seems to have abandoned that plan in the later going. Truffaut fans may be glad about that, as you’ll see.

Related:
Alfred Hitchcock Unplugged
"The Auteur Wars": Why Godard and Truffaut Couldn't Live Together Happily Ever After

Trailer Review: Eagle Eye (Full Trailer)

Paul Clark — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Who would have expected that one of the most intriguing-looking big-budget thrillers of this year would star Shia LaBeouf and be directed by the clown who made Taking Lives? Eagle Eye doesn’t look particularly fresh- basically it’s a twist on Hitchcock’s “innocent man wrongly accused” rejiggered for our tech-happy age. Yet there’s something delicious about how paranoid this looks, with shadowy organizations setting up innocent people as possible criminals as part of… what? A sick game? Or something more sinister? Of course, LaBeouf is a far cry from the old-Hollywood classiness of Hitchcockian leads like Cary Grant, but there’s something ratty-looking about him here that not only makes him more relatable for today’s audiences, but also makes his survival less certain. It’s entirely possible that this movie will be all premise, no execution, but the premise is good enough that for now, I’m on board.

M. Night Shyamalan Straight Up, Hold the Twist

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:30:00 GMT

We’ve already gone on record with our Screengrab prediction that M. Night Shyamalan’s latest opus The Happening will be one of the five biggest bombs of the summer, even going so far as to suggest that the next Hitchcock has instead become the new Ed Wood. But in an interview with the New York Times, Shyamalan tries to make the case that’s he misunderstood – he’s not just “the guy who makes the scary movies with a twist.”

Some experts feel it doesn’t matter who he is – that unless the name above the title is Steven Spielberg, audiences don’t really care who directed the movie. “It never really worked,” argues David Weitzner, the former head of worldwide marketing for Universal and an adjunct professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. “It’s pomposity on the part of studios to think that the public is going to respond to an advertising message that says to see the film because it’s from the director of another film. It’s stupid and to some degree, it’s fueled by ego.”

Ego is something that has gotten in Shyamalan’s way lately, particularly in the case of his last big screen effort The Lady in the Water. According to the Times, the director “committed the greatest sin of all — he criticized a meeting with Disney studio executives, Nina Jacobson, Dick Cook and Oren Aviv, in a book by Michael Bamberger, The Man Who Heard Voices. In the book, which received a huge amount of press, Mr. Shyamalan accused Ms. Jacobson of not giving his Lady in the Water script ‘a truthful reading” and said that he thought that it had been rejected because Disney 'no longer valued individualism.’…The Hollywood establishment was outraged by the book and Mr. Shyamalan’s public recitation of what are considered very private matters.”

Lady in the Water didn’t make much of a splash (sorry), maybe because it was a departure from Shyamalan’s string of “scary movies with a twist,” or maybe just because it was so damn silly. Whatever the case, he’s back in creepy thriller territory with The Happening, his first R-rated picture, and he still thinks his name is a viable brand. “The problem is the assumption that if I am selling the movie — because I’m selling me — that I’m being egotistical. If Will Smith did the same thing, it would be perceived very differently,” he said. “You’re supposed to be hidden if you’re a director. That’s a rule that who said in the movie business?” If The Happening flops, maybe he'll find out.

Related:
Trailer Review: The Happening
The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

In Other Blogs: They Shoot Bloggers, Don’t They?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Along with movie fans everywhere, film bloggers bid farewell to Sydney Pollack this week. Bright Lights After Dark sums up the prevailing sentiment in the title of this post: Good Director, Great Actor. “One of the best, certainly one of the most unusual, episodes of the half-hour anthology series, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was 1960's 'The Contest for Aaron Gold.' Directed by Norman Lloyd and based on a story by Philip Roth, it’s about a camp counselor, a teacher of ceramics, who observes a special talent in Aaron (Barry Gordon), one of the boys he is instructing in arts and crafts. While the other boys are using their clay to make crude snakes and pots, Aaron is making a finely detailed sculpture of a knight. But there’s a problem. The sculpture is missing an arm, and for some reason, Aaron refuses to complete it. The night before the boys’ parents are due to arrive, the counselor decides to complete the sculpture himself – with unexpected results. I recall this episode today, among other reasons, because of the extraordinary natural performance by the actor who played the camp counselor. It was the late Sydney Pollack, and to see him in this role is to wonder why he didn’t have the major acting career of a Hoffman or a De Niro. Instead, of course, Pollack became a director, and - not surprisingly - directing actors was one of his greatest strengths.”

Arbogast on Film offers a somewhat more pointed appreciation. “Sydney Pollack rates about half a dozen references in Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Hollywood, which means, I guess, that Biskind doesn't consider Pollack (who died yesterday at the age of 73) one of those saviors. Well, fuck Peter Biskind. I'm not knocking Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader or Brian DePalma - I like a lot of their movies, too - but at least Pollack never got high off his own supply and turned into a pathetic caricature of himself.”

At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir has a post-Cannes wrap-up. “Along the Croisette, the enormous billboards for international co-productions that may never be made, let alone seen by the paying public, will quickly come down. This year's most ubiquitous and puzzling ad was pushing an Egyptian-made thriller (or something) called The Baby Doll Night, featuring a tank on a ruined street with a woman's slip hanging from its cannon. It asks: ‘Can one night of pleasure mend 60 years of pain?’ Well, I'm just not sure. Another total baffler was a film called The Seven of Daran: The Battle of Pareo Rock, which appears to feature a baby giraffe, two kids, a helicopter and the slogan: ‘A myth never been told.’ (Fellow blogger and Cannes drinking buddy Glenn Kenny prefers the tagline for the Jason Statham vehicle Transporter 3: ‘The rules remain the same. Except some changes.’)”

Cinema Styles proprietor Jonathan Lapper has put together a terrific movie clip montage called Frames of Reference. “I knew I wanted to take just one piece of music, and using no ambient sounds from the films themselves, edit together clips building a rhythm according to the natural rhythm of the music. I had another goal in mind as well. I did not want to move through film history chronologically, working from a hundred plus years back and moving forward or going in reverse, and I did not want to break it down into sections according to genre. What I wanted to do, and did, was take advantage of the language of film, the words and letters, and the fact that so many films, whether consciously or not, use the same shots, the same angles, the same movements when telling their story. And so the montage exploits these similarities and puts them to the rhythm of the music.” Watch it here.

And finally in List-o-Mania, ReezChannel commemorates the release of Sex and the City with a Tribute to Big-Screen Cougars, “that special breed of single woman, generally in her 30s or 40s, who tosses aside traditional notions of femininity with a bold, independent, sexually adventurous approach to life.” Has the world forgotten Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment? (The correct answer is “yes.”)

Trailer Review: Eagle Eye

Paul Clark — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT

I’m not sure why this movie wasn’t on my radar before, but I’ve gotta say- this trailer is pretty kind of cool. I guess some of ignorance about this movie’s existence can be chalked up to the presence of D.J. Caruso in the director’s chair- The Salton Sea was OK, but Taking Lives and Two for the Money ate away at my soul enough that I didn’t bother with Disturbia. Judging by this trailer, perhaps I was too hasty- like Disturbia, Eagle Eye gives off the vibe of a Hitchcock wannabe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing- if nothing else, the movie does aim high. And Shia LaBeouf is pretty perfect for this role- not a prettied-up gym rat but a scruffy slacker type, one who wouldn’t necessarily be expected to jump immediately into hero mode when the chips are down. Admittedly, this just a tiny taste of the film, but this teaser does a damn fine job of making me want more. Also, is that Julianne Moore’s voice on the phone?

Unwatchable #93: "Howling III: The Marsupials"

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Here I face a similar problem as with the earlier entry Kickboxer 4: I went into the 1987 horror sequel Howling III without having seen its predecessor Howling II…Your Sister is a Werewolf. (I'm pretty sure I've seen the original Howling, directed by Joe Dante and co-written by John Sayles, but that didn't really help.) For all I know, I will encounter Howling II later in this process – as I've mentioned before, I don't peek ahead. It's possible that if I had seen Howling II, I would have been less confused by the beginning of Howling III. It's hardly possible I could have been more confused.

I knew I was in for something special right from the opening credits. Let’s start with the title. Ooh, scary! If there’s a subtitle less capable of striking fear in my heart than “The Marsupials,” I’m not sure what it would be. Howling III: The Fluffy Bunnies? Even that scares me more, but then again, I’ve seen Night of the Lepus. Then there’s this gem after the screenwriting credits: “Based on the novel by Gary Brandner.” Seriously? The Howling III is based on a novel? I looked it up at Amazon and it’s true, but if I am to believe the single customer comment, the movie is NOTHING like the book. Sigh, ’twas ever thus.

What is the movie like? Pretty freaky, actually. I don’t mean it’s actually frightening, and I certainly don’t mean it’s actually good, but I can’t say I was ever bored. We begin with an anthropologist showing footage his grandfather took in Cape York, Australia in 1905 of what appears to be a wolf-woman tied to a tree, being tortured by aborigines. “The mask on the woman is so realistic, we don’t know how they created it,” he claims. I don’t necessarily agree, but let’s not quibble. The action then shifts to Siberia for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, and then there are a few more seemingly random scenes that might make sense were I up to speed on the trilogy. I sort of doubt it, though; it’s almost as if every other scene was ripped out of the script in order to save money.

I do know that the bulk of the action takes place in Australia. I know this because the Sydney Opera House is in about seventeen different shots in the movie, so you know the makers really wanted to make it clear. There was a weird Aussie fetish going on in American pop culture in the ’80s – everything from Mad Max to Crocodile Dundee to Men at Work to that Jacko dude from the Energizer commercials. Anyone else remember this jackhole?

Anyway, Howling III is clearly trying to capitalize on the Down Under thunder, as it features a tribe of distinctly Mad Max-ish wolf people, one of whom is a hottie in the Rachel Hunter mode. At least, I thought she was a hottie until I saw her give birth to a slimy embryo and stuff it in her hairy pouch, and then suddenly I wasn’t so keen on her anymore. I guess the idea here is that a breed of Tasmanian wolf was killed off early in the 20th century, and in a quest for vengeance its spirit came into these people. Look, it doesn’t really matter. I could try to make some sense of the plot, but suffice it to say that the filmmakers are trying really, really hard to entertain you. There’s a bus full of werewolf nuns, a ballet dancer who turns werewolf in mid-performance, a were-skeleton that comes back to life, a leather-boy version of Alfred Hitchcock, a soundtrack full of synthpop power ballads that sound like Beverly Hills Cop rejects, and there’s even Dame Edna, years before her U.S. stardom. Maybe it’s just that as a child of the '80s, I’m hard-wired to be more susceptible to the junk of that era – but I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.

Previously on Unwatchable:

94. Invasion of the Neptune Men
95. Marci X
96. Track of the Moon Beast
97. Bolero
98. Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor